Autumn is drawing near. In our garden, we watch the children squeeze the last days of summer vacation. Our daughter Maria chats with friends. Her twin brother, Jimmy, delights in the girls' shrieks as he races toward them on his bicycle, then wheels back to safety. We feel a contentment we could never have imagined six years ago.
The children are eight now. Maria is in third grade, and Jimmy has become an increasingly cheerful and responsible boy. For the first four years of his life, he was a depressed and frustrated child. Furious screams—sometimes lasting hours—shattered his otherwise total silence. Those years held other memories: broken windows, objects hurled without warning; the constant crash of pots and lids; his bed shaken violently all night; soiled diapers and bottles (we couldn't wean him); objects flying past our heads; the relentless tension of living with that wild, unreachable, deeply loved child. Such was his world then, and ours with him.
How did we arrive at this peaceful, happy afternoon? Looking back, the turning point seems to have come when we learned to stand firm against Jimmy's unacceptable behavior.
Behaving Well
In theory, good behavior means choosing the appropriate action in a given situation. We behave well not only to get what we want, but because we weigh the possible effects of our actions. Jimmy could not understand this. He knew only his desires and sought to satisfy them any way he could—preferably at once. We had to carefully devise, then refine through experience, a method to teach him discipline. Living with Jimmy was hard, as it is with any child who knows no rules. Beyond that, his sense of security was threatened by not knowing what to expect from the world around him. Our disturbed child could make no real choices because no one had taught him behavior reflecting social awareness. "I want what I want when I want it"—that described Jimmy's behavior before we began working with him.Teaching Jimmy, Learning Ourselves
As we guided our disturbed child toward acceptable behavior, we discovered three essential qualities we parents had to possess and model for him: perseverance, firmness, and joy—joy in his progress, joy in our own growth alongside him. But the patience this required did not arrive simply with understanding the problem. We had to learn it through exhausting, endlessly repeated tasks.* * *
Night after night, Jimmy would climb out of bed several times. Year after year, we rose and put him back, saying: "Now Jimmy goes to bed." It took patience to do this every night for years, but finally Jimmy obeyed. Now he sleeps through the night. Jimmy bounced continually on the beds. We stopped him hundreds of times, saying: "Beds are for sleeping." Slowly his understanding grew. With each repeated word and action, our patience wore thinner—but so did Jimmy's resistance. We were not after infinite patience, but enough to wear down his stubbornness.Persistence
Perseverance—our steady, unbroken effort to teach Jimmy—was essential for him to learn what we expected. There were moments when fatigue, discomfort, or simple self-indulgence tempted us. How easy it would have been to let him wander the house or bounce on the beds. It would have taken less time to pick up what he pulled from the drawers than to guide him while saying, "Put it away." Yet we soon realized that every time we abandoned our response to his misbehavior, the next correction met with fresh resistance.Firmness
Jimmy needed our firmness. We tried to meet this need with praise or corrective guidance. In those early years, bombarded by well-meaning advice from relatives and friends, we felt deeply uncertain. When he screamed for hours, people told us to spank him, stop spoiling him, or ignore him. When we spanked him, guilt consumed us. When we tried to seem unmoved, our hearts ached. When we ignored him, we knew we weren't helping him learn. Later, we resolved to observe the troubling behavior carefully, choose a sound approach to discipline, and commit firmly to it—resisting contradictory advice. We learned all this by responding with perseverance and patience to his misbehavior.* * *
Because our disturbed child could not make choices, we had to guide him toward them. One of his impulsive behaviors was throwing whatever he held. As we led him toward appropriate choices, we proceeded this way. We said: "A plate is for eating. A top is for spinning," and while speaking, we removed the plate and put a top in his hand. We had to repeat this ritual many times before Jimmy grasped the purpose of different objects. We learned to build this kind of discipline—one that sets limits—by designating specific places where certain behaviors were allowed. Jimmy went through a phase of constant spitting, so we established exact places where this was permitted: the bathroom sink, outdoors, the toilet, and other suitable spots. Whenever he began to spit, we guided him to that area, saying: "Don't spit on people. You can spit in the sink." Throwing objects was another problem, another phase we overcame. We set up a place where things could be thrown without breaking, always translating our actions into words: "We don't throw things in the house. Jimmy can throw them in the yard below."